Muslim rage burns in our backyard

Page Tools

Western liberals must rethink their attitudes towards the causes of
religious tension, writes Miranda Devine.

AT LENNOX Head Public School on the North Coast, children have
for decades recited a prayer at assembly. The prayer begins "O God
Our Heavenly Father" and asks that the school be blessed "so that
one day we may do great work for you, Australia and all mankind".
Sentiments to be proud of. Only now the prayer has been dropped,
pending a review, after complaints from a parent or two.

Keeping the sweet, uplifting words out of the school has become
a holy mission for some, encouraged by The Daily Telegraph
commentator and former primary school principal Maralyn Parker, who
derided the prayer yesterday as "19th century Christian
gobbledygook".

It seemed likely the NSW Education Department would bow again to
the demands of the intolerant extreme - in this case, the radical
secularists. Instead, it has sensibly allowed the school's parents
and citizens committee to decide next month whether to restore the
prayer or dump it for good, a department spokeswoman said
yesterday.

Kowtowing to the unreasonable demands of intolerant minorities
trying to impose their will on the majority is not going to
safeguard Australia from "fanatical religious hate, exclusion,
death and terror", as Parker seems to think. Quite the
opposite.

Concepts of tolerance, freedom and loving one's neighbour as
oneself don't exist in a vacuum, any more than "ethics" exist
without a moral framework.

Trying to erase the long-established culture of Australia,
permanently rooted as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and
replacing it with vapid, secularist nothingness is not going to
help. It simply creates a vacuum for radical Islam to rush in and
fill.

And it is doing its best. At the weekend, at Belmore Mosque,
Melbourne's radical Sheik Mohammed Omran criticised Australia and
its "half-naked" women, and predicted "they" would start turning
Muslims against each other. "Don't believe this is a free country,"
he railed. "It's only a free country for the Bondi Beach
people."

While responsible Muslim clerics such as Lakemba Mosque's mufti,
Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, have declared themselves firmly on the
side of Australia against extremists and those who preach hate,
there are other up-and-comers spreading a different message to
young Sydney Muslims, warning against the evil temptations of
decadent mainstream Australia.

The Sydney-born Sheik Feiz Mohammad of the Global Islamic Youth
Centre in Liverpool made a name for himself in March when he told
1000 people at Bankstown Town Hall that rape victims have "no one
to blame but themselves".

"A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world," he said.
"Why? No one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the
entire world strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but
satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight
jeans to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature."

He later apologised after a fashion, but the fact remains that
he has a big following of young men who are open to the idea that
they are separate and superior to a corrupt and decadent Australian
culture whose women are sluts.

The Australian-born young Muslim gang rapists who plagued Sydney
a few years ago were said by police to have deliberately targeted
non-Muslim "Australian" girls and referred to one victim as an
"Aussie pig". They were also avid consumers of internet
pornography. The London bombers, mostly British-born, Muslim,
middle-class, educated and newly devout, were also said to hold
contempt for what they regarded as a decadent British culture whose
women they saw as no better than prostitutes.

The American commentator Thomas Friedman, exploring why so many
young angry Sunni Muslim males are prepared to become suicide
bombers, writes: "They are, on the one hand, tempted by Western
society, and ashamed of being tempted."

Their inner conflict leads them to become vulnerable to
terrorist recruiters and the kind of hate-talk found in books for
sale at Islamist fundamentalist bookshops in Lakemba and Melbourne,
praising Osama bin Laden as a hero and suicide bombing as
noble.

The increasing permissiveness of Western culture, coupled with a
multiculturalism that encourages ethnic ghettoes, can only fuel the
inner conflicts of alienated young Muslim men.

And with secularists hell-bent on removing any religious
influence, no matter how benign, from daily life, it is no wonder
that decadent displays in the Big Brother Uncut tradition
now seem commonplace, and fashion increasingly aims to make little
girls look like hookers. This is the view of Australian culture
that causes traditional Muslims and Christians alike to pull
away.

As Salmaan, a Muslim Australian, told me in an email recently:
"Most Muslims who have migrated to this country have been shocked
by how universal values [and] gender etiquettes lasting a thousand
years have been tossed aside in an orgiastic free for all in the
last 20.

"This is not what my parents expected when they came to this
country. I am also sure that this is not what John Locke envisaged
when he championed individual liberty."

Left-liberals are always banging on about "root causes" of
terrorism, generally finding the United States and "Western
imperialism" to blame; most recently they have claimed Britain's
involvement in the Iraq war prompted the latest atrocity in
London.

But they dare not confront this possible root cause of young
Muslim male rage in their own countries and their own role in
fomenting hatred of Western values.